11 october

“Not everything has to be a metaphor all the time, you know,” says Juan Carlos Reyes Alfonso. Juan Carlos is the smartest of all of my brothers, of whom I have none.

“Maybe you should just tell the truth sometimes,” says my mother. My mother is concerned about all of this fictionalizing and the effect it will undoubtedly have on her reputation in certain corners of this neighborhood.

If she really wanted to worry, she might consider that the truth is often much more sensational than whatever else might make these certain neighborhood corners and imaginary brothers raise their semi-fictional eyebrows.

10 october

no doubt on shelves everywhere soon

Raking Half the Yard

On a Windy Day

and other accidental metaphors

9 october

With satisfaction

in anticipation of

an argument to come,

my friend Andrew will tell you—

declare, really—that ketchup

is his favorite food.

The pounce will come when you—

fool that you most happily are—

mistakenly challenge the validity of ketchup

as a food.

This aside, it was altogether fitting I should meet Andrew in Ukraine. In a land without peanut butter, Dr. Pepper, or sprinkle cheese, ketchup was in plentiful and varied abundance—whole shelves dedicated to it, most of them ready to be offered up to forest-grilled shaslyk, barbequed kebabs, and sausages sliced on trains and served with similarly sliced hardboiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, and bread, dipped and mayonnaised, long into the whistling night. If I were to list the varieties of ketchup here, you’d be distracted and rather thrown off, I’d imagine, and we’d never get on with the rest of the story.

8 october

The real fear now the challenge

is to balance

the possibility

the likelihood of becoming nothing

of no job no possibility

or too easily too suggestibly

becoming something totally wrong

due simply to its being mentioned

as if some morning I should see

an ad praising golden

crispy edges and a

pat of perfect butter and

BAM

just like that

I should become toast

7 october

If I had the chance to start it would be from a blank space and the wall would be clear I would lean up against it with my back I would keep track of the angles they would be small they would be acute I am losing confidence in measurements for ten years I have been trying to tell time by the big numbers and in the meantime I mean time has been passing I’ve been blasting off I’ve been coughing a bit dry in the back of my ear drums playing along at speeds exceeding playlists I’ve missed being sensible missed writing the date on the board the days when days had meaning and I got up in the morning with a plan those days are not behind me but some of them are and the days ahead are numbered but I can’t tell when they’ll start I am on the wrong counting system the path of least resistance is a slippery one I am thinking about working in a grocery store and how reasonable it would be to work in customer service or maybe just to move cans of green beans around and to put them in stacks maybe to scan them over red lines of light beep they would say beep beans they would say and on down the line corn as well and other sorts of things packages this was a different time I remember this is a different kind of pattern and I am thinking the matter with myself I am toasting dishes instead of bread and this is hardly the way to behave at all I am a structural relational highly influenceable sort of person so please be careful what you say please be careful with the weather I am prone to leaning a little literary I am starting magazines in my sleep and reorganizing my future outreach goals this afternoon and on the way home from elsewhere I made a plan for a workshop where all the goings on could happen and all that’s certain is a storefront and some hardword floors the arts classes and the writing always the writing the publishing and the projects the contests and the yes please these are the things I love and the making happen the yes please the difference making I am enamored of this so maybe this will be the next novel the moving on in different directions and how it could all end but really that would be fictional too so rather self-serving that would be at best it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise though it’s really about other people and serving them in a way sort of isn’t it well in theory it is and in practice there’s not much practically speaking that I’m doing here other than practicing taking up space and making good use of the practice also of repeating myself there’s something to be said about that which is to say there isn’t but if there were I would already have said it here and you would have wondered why and if I didn’t already apologize I will now

6 october

as second-guessing

turns to minutes

minute observation

counterintuition

hours scouring sense

no recompense indeed

for the glory of liberty

seized from diseased desire

////////

the feeling that walking is too slow

but the ragged way

jagged-air-lumbering

running takes too much

/////////

I knew I would fall

when I jumped, even before

but I thought, even when I knew

it’s that time—again—

when I said yes

even after // are you kidding?

(right for once at once)

[Eraser marks mean red pen follows]

I have experience resumes degrees

It’ll be better different solid

I will be desirable marketable

He won’t be jealous needy

And I jump